


"L" For Effort

by Missy



Category: Laverne & Shirley (TV)
Genre: Children, Conception Difficulties, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Friendship, Humor, Married Couple, Married Life, Menstruation, Parenthood, Undressing, real talk, scoldings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:02:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23665075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: A sequel to Futsin's "Ballgame."The road to their third child isn't as smooth as Laverne and Lenny  had hoped it might be, and it's up to Lenny to remind Laverne that, kids or not, he loves her deeply.
Relationships: Laverne DeFazio/Lenny Kosnowski
Comments: 3
Kudos: 3





	"L" For Effort

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Futsin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Futsin/gifts).



Laverne knows they’ve missed this month the second she wakes up with a dull ache in her lower back.

Ugh. She’s already bleeding.

Laverne waddles into the bathroom and manages to get a tampon properly inserted. She shoves her pajama bottoms in the laundry and hopes that there isn’t too big of a stain on the sheets before getting dressed for the day. She washes her hands, brushes her teeth and hair out before Andy starts banging on the door for his turn.

She tousles his hair gently. “Morning,” she says, and he grumbles a string of vowels, staggering to the sink. The boy was a kid after her own heart – and not a morning person.

Barb is already up, an explosion of new words pouring from her lips in Lenny’s arms with the morning sunshine filtering in through the window making her look a little holy but still wild. Lenny’s wearing his striped pajamas – what he’d once told her were his ‘love pajamas,’ though she wouldn’t apply that description to them – and staring down at their daughter, teaching her new words, approving of the ones she understood.

But when Laverne enters the room, as always, she becomes the center of his world. Lenny takes one look at Laverne and knows somehow. “No?” he asks, his head tilting to the side and watching her. Curiosity tinged with pity shows up in his eyes, and she hates being pitied even for a second.

She shakes her head. Lenny extends his free arm for an embrace, but she can’t allow herself to take his babying. “It’s okay,” she says, but sits beside him on the bed instead of cuddling up. 

Barb’s hand pats Laverne’s cheek. “Mama sad?” she asks.

“No, baby,” Laverne says. “Mama’s okay.” Barb doesn’t seem to believe her and pats the corner of her mouth, trying to get Laverne to smile. That does bring Laverne back into Lenny’s embrace, and for a long moment they hold one another while Andy gargles and brushes his teeth audibly nearby.

Lenny kisses Laverne between the eyes before he gets up. “I’ll do breakfast today.”

Laverne raises an eyebrow. “The last time I let you cook breakfast, you gave the kids Pepsi and chocolate cake.”

“You told me to get rid of the leftovers! I thought that was doing the job,” he whines.

Laverne sighs and squints at him. As always, he mirrors her perfectly, and Barb, after taking a look at them both, squints back, even imitating the monkeylike setting of Lenny’s jaw. Sometimes that’s unconscious, like when they’d simultaneously straddled the backs of her kitchen chairs the day she tried to convince him he had what it took to be a ‘San Juan’ like Squiggy, sometimes it was part of a teasing game they’d long ago developed. They had been cut from the same cloth, grown in the same pot. 

She caves just a little. “Okay. I’ve gotta get Barb ready to go. Edna said she’d watch them for half the day.” It was high July, and two days to their anniversary, which meant her period had shown up at the worst possible time. “You cook, I’ll dress and we do the dishes together, deal?”

“Deal.” He kisses her forehead. “Someone’s gotta go potty first, though.”

“No! Big girl!” Barb says, and kicks Laverne in the sternum. 

“You’re a very big girl,” Laverne says. “But big girls still need help.” She glances over her shoulder and watches Lenny watching her for just a minute before he heads to the bathroom to get ready for work. Laverne will be the last person to add to the apartment’s hot water bill.

The morning becomes a flurry of changing children, making sure they’d used the bathroom, washing up for the morning and trying to serve breakfast up. Lenny had gone safe with fruit, cereal and orange juice. Laverne smirked as she remembered their early days as a married couple – he’d nearly burned the kitchen down trying to make her bacon and eggs when she was pregnant with Andy. They were both barely better at it now.

She clears the table while Lenny gathers the kids and makes sure they have their toys. Lenny’s hand lingers upon her back as he passes by, grabbing his keys. “we’ll talk about it tonight?”

She nods. “I’ll pick the kids up after work.”

“Okay. Got band practice after that. Pick me up at four?”

“Okay!”

He kisses her one more time before they walk together, a team of four, to Edna’s apartment over the Pizza Bowl, where the kids would get to spend time with Grandma Edna before heading to the Pizza Bowl for lunch.

**** 

It’s just another day at work for Laverne – albeit one abrupted by the need to change her pads and tampons out every five hours. Union rules were a blessing, sometimes – no one asked questions if she needed a personal minute.

All of the questions came from her best friend, who immediately cornered her the second they hit the breakroom.

“All right – Sunday. What were you and Lenny doing – besides the obvious and no, I don’t need the disgusting details.”

Laverne sighed. “Shirl, we ain’t telling anyone yet ‘cause it ain’t happened.” 

“What ‘aint’ happened’?” Shirley asked.

Laverne swallowed a mouthful of milk. “Me and Len, we’re trying for another baby.”

Shirley’s eyes bugged out. “Laverne! I know Leonard just got a raise and you’ve been thinking about night school…”

“…Which I’m gonna probably flunk out of, so don’t bring up that waste of money again,” Laverne said.

“…But three kids in five years! When you both know you’re going to need a bigger apartment when Barb gets older. What would your mother say?”

“That we’re good Catholics?” Laverne asked.

“And in public! Where anyone could see! Need I remind you of The Norman Incident?”

Laverne cringed the memory. That was shorthand for one unfortunate incident that had occurred when she and Lenny – a few months into their courtship and acting on impulse – had decided to make it in the alley between the Pizza Bowl and the bank nextdoor. Her father – always wary of activity out there since his bathroom had been blown up years ago – had called the police. The responding officer had been Laverne’s ex-boyfriend, Norman Hughes.

It was one of the worst possible ways to be booked for public indecency, though Squiggy had been very proud of Lenny when he came to bail them both out of jail. As bemused as Norman had done her a favor and had the charges stricken from the record after they paid a fine, and he’d also softened the truth to Frank, but Shirley had figured everything out immediately. And she’d Judged. The end result had been Lenny and Laverne buying twelve tickets to the policeman’s ball every year and Laverne trying – mightily, with all of her strength – to balance being a good wife and a good mom. Which she was, she hoped and believed – mostly.  
“This is different Shirl! We’re married! We’ve got a piece of paper that says we can do that any time we want to, any day we want to.”

“Of course, and I respect your right to do so,” Shirley said. “But I don’t want to have to be the one to bail you out of jail because you can’t control your glands. I mean, you’re the mother of my godchildren! You named your daughter after my mother!”

“We named her after Lenny’s sister!” They really had, but Shirley was persistent in her belief that they’d named it after Lily – or Barb, whatever she was calling herself these days.

“Pshaw!”

“I hate it when you say that! And it was just one time,” she said. “I promise.”

Shirley nodded firmly and took a bite of her egg salad. 

This is why Laverne has never told Shirley about how she’d lost her virginity. She loved her best friend, but didn’t think hearing about Lenny, the tent and the Fourth of July would make her anything remotely close to happy.

** 

Laverne took the kids to the park after work. She knew how long practice would take by now – two hours, if Lenny and Squiggy didn’t get into a fight. This also meant watching Squiggy’s daughter, Squigelle, but as rambunctious as that girl was, she was still less of a wild thing that Barb.

“Up!” Barb demanded, pointing at the monkey bars.

“Sweetie, you’re too tiny for that,” Laverne said. Laverne herself had clambered across the equipment when she and Shirley had played hooky together from work at his very park. Today she was exhausted and she’d have to change her tampon when she got to the Pizza Bowl, and her daughter wasn’t making life easier at the moment.

“UP MAMA NOW!” she demanded.

“Barbara Rodan Kosnowski!” Actually saying her daughter’s full name out loud still made her want to giggle. But she and Lenny had gone splits on naming the kids – another flipped coin. He’d chosen to name Andy after his best friend and she’d chosen to name the baby after his sister; her son carried her father’s name as his middle name, and her daughter was named after Rodan, the star of the monster movie Laverne and Lenny had been necking at the night they’d conceived Barbara. 

“No baby! Go high!” Barbra added, pouting. Laverne sighed and put her daughter in a swing, then started to gently push it. 

“High enough for you?” she asked Barb, who giggled gleefully. She had another fifteen minutes of this to get through, heaven help her. 

She loved her kids, but not when she was bleeding near to death.

Eventually, she collected Andy and Squigelle from the playhouse, where they’d been making their army men rappel from the top window of the park’s playhouse. Together, they drove to the Pizza Bowl, and after dropping the kids off with her Pop – who was, as always, so happy to have grandchildren that he didn’t make much of a fuss over her doing so – she changed her tampon and headed into the basement. 

In what had once been her father’s wine cellar and was now a mixed-purpose rehearsal space (her father was VERY happy to have grandchildren), the boys and the other three members of the Squiggtones had devolved into loud, raucous discussion. That meant that her husband would be free in about ten minutes, if history wasn’t failing her.

“’Ey, Laverne!” yelled Squiggy when he saw her. Lenny just beamed, his fingertips running up the fretboard of his guitar. “Whatt’d you do, eat my kid?”

“She’s upstairs. Hey boys. Don’t let me interrupt.” She sat on the staircase and propped her chin in her hand. She’d spent a million hours doing this – either listening to Lenny practice through the dumbwaiters that had connected their apartments or going to the boys’ gigs or loaning them her apartment so they could practice without disturbing the other tenants in their building. 

“Hey Laverne,” Lenny said.

“Hey. Don’t let me interrupt,” she said.

“We’re almost through,” Lenny said. “Squig’s got a new song we wanna do, but we need a guy to play saxophone on it.”

“It’s called ‘The Wolfman is my Daddy,” said Squiggy. Laverne chuckled. Squiggy frowned at her. “You know, that was Lenny’s exact reaction. Whatever is so amusing about a junior wolfman rampaging across the countryside?” he asked.

“Nevermind,” she said.

Then Lenny started playing a familiar chord and he looked at her. “ _Standing on the corner…_ ”

“Len,” she said warningly.

“Come on! You know when I start you have to finish it.”

She rolled her eyes and she approached the microphone stand, giving him the call and response he desired. This song had been a hit when they were nine, and they’d been singing it together ever since.

They made it all the way through the song with the rest of the band breaking in to support them. When it was over, and she was pointing mock-accusingly at her own husband, they broke up laughing.

“Anyone got any pancakes?” Squiggy asked.

“Why?” Laverne.

“’Cause I gotta blow my nose after you pumped me full of sap!”

Laverne extended her tongue and gave him a raspberry. Then she said, “c’mon, Len. Squig don’t have any appreciation for culture!” 

“Show me culture and I’ll appreciate!” Squiggy retorted. 

Band practice promptly broke up. They’d meet on Friday again, and Len would likewise relieve Laverne of her parenting duties on Tuesday so she and the Lady Shotz bowling team could get their practice time in. It had been a refreshingly fair arrangement, and one that had shocked their friends. They collected their pizza-stuffed kids and took home a pie to reheat for their own dinner.

The second they were home, Lenny took the kids in for a quick bath and to brush their teeth while Laverne did a little light clean-up. Once they were out of the bathroom she rinsed herself, changed pads, and listened to Lenny sing both kids to sleep.

It was the Beach Boys tonight. “God Only Knows,” which actually happened to be their song. Laverne stood in the doorway and listened to Lenny sing, watching the kid’s shoulders rise and fall as they drifted away. Her eyes lingered on Andy tonight. She loved him rotten, even as he got to that age where being around her was supremely embarrassing. Sometimes she worried that he thought they loved Barbara best, which wasn’t true – because picking between her kids would be like picking her favorite tooth. She loved them both equally for entirely different reasons. 

Lenny turned to face her, his guitar dangling by his waist on its beaten-up strap. There was worry in his blue eyes tonight. “Bedroom?” he asked her.

At least he didn’t bite his palm anymore when he said the word. “Bedroom,” she agreed.

Lenny sat down on the edge of the bed and took her into his arms the second her bottom hit the mattress. “Tell me how you’re doing,” he begged.

She shook her head sadly. “I dunno, Len. Things are a mess. I feel like I failed you.”

Lenny shook his head at the very notion. “Nothing you could ever do would fail me,” he said.

She pulled away from him incredulously. “I got pregnant with Andy so easy. With Barb we weren’t even trying. All I can think is ‘what’s wrong with you, dummy?’”

“There ain’t nothing wrong with you. The doctor said so, right?” Laverne nodded. “I dunno. Maybe it’s me? Maybe I just started shooting blanks out of the blue?” He shrugged. “Might be the timing. Or maybe we’re doing the wrong positions. Anyway, it don’t matter.” This time she punched his shoulder. “Ow!” he whined.

“Whaddya mean it don’t matter? We’ve been doing each other so hard Shirl’s mad at us and now you say it don’t matter?!”

“Shirley’s mad at us?” She nodded. “For the ballgame?” another bob of her head. “I mean – we already have two kids that’re our flesh and blood. So if this don’t work out the old fashioned way, maybe we adopt,” Lenny said. “If it’s good enough for Fonzie, it’s good enough for us. Or maybe we take a break from trying real hard for a year and let stuff happen by itself. Or maybe we’re just happy with the two kids we got.”

“Len…”

“There ain’t no shame in it, Laverne. We got a matching set – and they’re kinda perfect. Like you. Don’t you see that? I’d love you if we didn’t have any kids. I’d love you if we had a million. I love you, not parts of you. Not what I can get off of you. Just you, Laverne.”

She sat back and said, “Oh.” And she wanted to cry, but tears didn’t have a place in the room, not tonight. 

“Yeah,” he said, and kissed her on the cheek, the same way he had at that awful brewery party so many years ago. Then he sat back and let go of her hands. 

“Let me help you get into your jammies,” Lenny said. She knew for a fact that nothing naked was going to happen – they knew from experience the middle part of her period wasn’t conductive to good sex, probably because of her hormones – so she shrugged and started unbuttoning buttons. This was Lenny’s version of nurturing, so she let him take off her work smock, her blouse, her bra, her pants. He tossed them over the dressing table chair before he sloughed off his red satin jacket, his teeshirt, and started unbuckling his belt. Laverne left her panties on as she shimmied into the green nightgown he’d tossed her, and she was waiting under the covers when he was in his boxers, the lights going off.

Lenny sighed as he took her into his arms. This was, she thought to herself, her man – Len mainly, Lenny when she wanted his attention, baby when she was beyond herself with physical sensations, her guy. When he looked at her he probably saw Laverne, or beloved, or, if he was beyond himself, Mine.

“Pizza and beer later?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. Probably for breakfast. She was emotionally wiped out. 

He stroked her upper arm. “Why do you always get goosebumps when I say I’ll get you a beer?”

“Long story,” she said. Laverne did nothing else – said nothing else – but instead snuggled closer and into Lenny’s chest.

“Here,” he said, tracing an invisible letter on her breast. “A for effort.”

She snorted against his flesh and pressed her hand flat to the middle of his back. A tiny part of her absolutely thought she deserved that invisible, nonextent A.

But so did he.


End file.
